


air and space

by plutosrose



Series: Bucky Barnes Bingo 2020 [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Identity Issues, M/M, Memory, Memory Loss, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Smithsonian, Whumptober 2020, alt. 9
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:15:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26776474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: “He was smaller,” he breathed to himself, forgetting for a brief moment that one of the cardinal rules of any mission was to make sure that he didn’t make any noise.-A man visits the Smithsonian.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Bucky Barnes Bingo 2020 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1882291
Comments: 4
Kudos: 60
Collections: Bucky Barnes Bingo 2020, Whumptober 2020





	air and space

The Smithsonian was crowded with tourists. The Asset had become an expert at weaving in and out of crowds without being noticed--grabbing a baseball cap here, a jacket there, and becoming one of them. 

But this was the first time that he felt like he might actually be part of the crowd, and not just trying to disappear in it. 

The Asset didn’t have a problem standing still for long periods of time. Sometimes, he wouldn’t move again until someone else told him to. 

But when he disappeared into the queue of people waiting to enter the Air and Space Museum, it wasn’t long before he started to feel a sense of unease crawling under his skin. 

He looked in front of him, where two girls were looking down at their phones, then glanced over his shoulder to see that a man was trying to coax his son to stop crying, and slipped out of the line. With him gone, the man and his son moved up like he’d never been there at all.

His gaze flicked up, noting the locations of the security cameras that were perched on the outside of the building, his mind calculating its blank spot. This was all he found that his brain could do. Find blank spots. Shoot a gun. Stay still. Do what he was told and wait to be told otherwise.

He could be anywhere and nowhere all at once. That was how, in the split second that one of the security guards outside waved the crowd to move forward, he disappeared out of sight and forced open the door to one of the building’s side entrances. 

The inside of the museum was loud and brightly colored. He disliked it almost immediately. Both the thought and the feeling were foreign to him. He wasn’t used to having thoughts. Frankly, he hadn’t thought that he could have them at all.

He walked through the Milestones of Flight hall, before slipping into a group of people that were walking into a hall called ‘The Wright Brothers & The Invention of the Aerial Age.’ 

The words didn’t mean much to him. He’d tried reading some newspapers the day after the helicarriers had fallen, but the words all seemed to be jumbled together in his brain. They meant something, but because they did not convey tactical knowledge, he couldn’t decipher their meaning. 

He knew they had to mean something, because of the way that he watched parents point out different parts of the exhibit to their children or because people kept holding up their phones to take pictures.

He furrowed his brow for a second. Didn’t phones used to look different?

He had no proof that they did, but that one thought was stuck in his head as he followed the flow of people out of the hall and toward the line for the Captain America exhibit. 

One of the things that the Asset had learned was that it was helpful to pay attention to people’s conversations. There was always the chance that you could overhear something that would be critical to completing a mission successfully. 

Every few seconds he caught snippets of conversations, but they weren’t that important. ‘I want to go to Elephant & Castle after we leave here’ or ‘I want to see the Amelia Earhart stuff too.’ 

There were a couple of kids too wearing shirts that had that red-white-and-blue shield on it. That belonged to the man who called him his friend, he thought, feeling somewhat frustrated with himself when he couldn’t prompt himself to have any other thoughts beyond that. 

The exhibit itself was full of swelling orchestral music at the entrance, with a smattering of inspirational quotes. He didn’t recognize any of them, but noted that one of them was from the president. He furrowed his brow at the man’s name. It seemed wrong, somehow. 

The Asset took orders. The Asset never deviated from the plan. The Asset did not get confused. He did what he was told. He was a weapon that they could point at their enemies. 

There were two life-sized photos near each other--one was of the man on the helicarrier, and the other, well, he hadn’t been able to get too close, because the second that he’d stepped closer, there’d been a flash of something in his head.

Usually he didn’t see memories so clearly in his head. Occasionally, he remembered a word or phrase that stuck to his mind, that seemed out-of-place. Mostly his mind was empty and buzzed non-stop. Weapons did not have thoughts. 

But this was different. He could clearly see the man in the photograph throwing his arms around him, curling up against him, telling him that they were going to find a way out, they’d hitchhike their way to Canada if they had to, he wasn’t going to die, he loved him too much. 

“He was smaller,” he breathed to himself, forgetting for a brief moment that one of the cardinal rules of any mission was to make sure that he didn’t make any noise. 

The rush of people eager to make their way through the exhibit prompted him to keep moving, and it was at that moment that he saw exactly what it was that he’d come for.

His brow furrowed as he stared at the man’s photograph on the glass wall in front of him. The man looked a lot like him, but at the same time, he wasn’t him. Was he? 

No, he looked too different. And this man was dead. He sometimes got the dates mixed up in his head (it wasn’t important for the Asset to know what day it was when he was about to go on a mission, but he was always listening, even when they thought that he wasn’t)--but he knew it wasn’t 1944 anymore. 

And he wasn’t dead like this man was. 

This man knew Captain America--Steve--Captain Rogers--Captain America Steve Rogers. His mind wasn’t too good on details, but he could tell that there were lots of names for the man that he had met on the hellicarrier. 

They weren’t friends? Were they friends? The talking thing (the Asset didn’t need to know what things were called) was telling him that they were friends, just like Captain Rogers America Steve had told him they were. 

Inseparable. 

And just like that, for the first time in his entire existence, he felt angry. If they were really inseparable, how come he’d never seen him before? If words and memories and thoughts were supposed to be in his head, then where had he gone when they’d all been taken away from him? 

Without realizing it, he’d brought his hand down on the display a little bit stronger than he’d intended. The elderly woman who had been standing a couple of feet away jumped at the sudden noise.

“Are you alright?”

“I don’t know,” he murmured. The words came out before he had the chance to really think about them. He barely remembered using his voice some days. Or anything other than the buzzing and nothingness in his head.  
The woman stepped closer and peered curiously at him. “You look a lot like him. Are you a relative?” 

Relative relative relative what was a relative? Family? Somewhere in his mind, a little girl with dark brown hair held his hand as they walked after the man in the photograph. Only he wasn’t a man and neither was he. Right?

He forced himself to shake his head. 

“Are you sure you’re alright?” the woman asked again, and he forced himself to nod. He was good at complying mission report mission report mission report ready to comply.

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Just tired.”

The soldat did not get tired, but maybe James Buchanan Barnes did, and he was happy to borrow the identity of someone who could for a while. 

The woman nodded, before turning to walk to another part of the exhibit. 

-

It was in front of a replica of the Valkyrie, the plane that a little card told him Captain America had flown into the frigid waters of the arctic to save the United States from certain destruction that he had another flash--this time of grabbing a hand and falling falling falling.

And he was cold, so cold, and he would never be warm again.

He took a deep breath and stared at the plane. He was pretty sure that he’d never seen it before, but there was something–maybe in one of the words on the exhibit--that held the key to who he was before and what that flash meant. 

But when he stared down at them, none of them made sense. He could understand so many different words and phrases in different languages, but trying to peel them away and find the meaning underneath was something else entirely. 

And the harder he tried, the more unknowable it seemed to become, drifting further and further out of reach. 

-

At the very end of the exhibit, there was a movie. The idea of staying in the dark for too long made his skin crawl, but he stayed at the threshold of the room long enough to see a brown-haired woman with a British accent tell the audience that, “Even after he died, Steve was still changing my life.” 

His lip twitched, and he couldn’t decide if those words made him feel proud or annoyed or angry. Maybe a little bit of all three of them. 

There was a quick flash of bloody knuckles and the small man in the photograph pulling away from him. A flash of a tentative kiss, a flash of bloody teeth, a flash of a horrible, unending, empty ache in the pit of his stomach. 

-

He spent a decent amount of time in the museum’s gift shop, examining the brightly colored figurines and lingering over the book titles. He kept his hands in his pockets, resolving not to touch anything unless he was planning on buying it (he might have stolen a wallet to make sure he had some cash, the Asset needed to do what he could to make sure that he survived). 

There were no books about the man on the glass, at least, not that he could tell. He thought about asking the cashier, who was scrolling through their phone as he wandered around the shop, but thought better of it. The Asset was not supposed to ask questions.

Instead, he grabbed a few of the Captain America biographies that he found above a stack of plastic shields. 

When he brought them to the cashier, they didn’t look directly at him, instead sliding the books over some kind of scanner. “$52.50.”

He nodded and slid a few twenties over, before he caught sight of a postcard with Captain America on the front, giving a salute to an invisible ally.

“He’s not supposed to look like that,” he murmured to himself, frowning. The cashier didn’t seem to have heard him and simply slipped his books into a plastic bag.

“This too,” he grabbed the postcard off of the rack. He didn’t know why he wanted it, especially since every time he looked at it, it felt so wrong. But he felt better when the cashier slid it into the bag too and charged him another dollar.  
-

Outside on the steps of the museum, he took the postcard out and held it in his hands. Steve’s name came easily to him. It wasn’t Captain America, it was Steve. This was Steve, made up to look like the man on the bridge. The man who had fallen off the helicarrier, that was Steve too.

His name came easy, and it felt like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, even if his own felt elusive and unknowable. 

He tucked the postcard back into the bag and slipped into the crowd again. He would go somewhere, he thought, somewhere new that didn’t have any distractions. That would be best. He always needed a rest after missions. 

And having the man on the postcard there with him would help.


End file.
